Allyson Proulx wants people to know that she and Andy Cadotte do not speak for all of the volunteers in Forest City Food Not Bombs. They are just two people in a collective looking to create change in London, Ontario.

Forest City Food Not Bombs is a volunteer collective addressing food insecurity, poverty, and homelessness by providing free meals to those in need. On the last Saturday of every month, the group shares free soup with the London community. All of the soup is handmade by volunteers, using food that would otherwise be thrown out or freshly grown vegetables donated by Urban Roots London. Initially, they set up a table at London’s downtown Victoria Park for people to pick up their meals. But when volunteers saw how few people showed up in the winter, they started going mobile, hand-delivering food to encampments along the Deshkan Ziibi.

“Food Not Bombs, for me, is mutual aid…We’re not a charity,” says Proulx, who has volunteered with the group since the summer of 2023. “We’re not just ‘going to feed homeless people’, it’s ‘how do we work with people who are unhoused?’”

The Forest City group is one of many Food Not Bombs chapters worldwide. The U.S.-born collective was started in 1980 by a group of anti-nuclear activists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Each Food Not Bombs group is a completely independent organization that operates according to their community’s needs. The groups are non-hierarchical, meaning that there are no leaders—everybody is a volunteer.

Previous iterations of London Food Not Bombs groups existed in 2008 and 2012, but fizzled out due to activists moving cities and pursuing different projects over the years. The current London chapter started in June 2023 by a crew of activists who were interested in seeing a movement like this come back to the city. “It’s such a powerful, beautiful thing to feed one another on multiple levels, like spiritually, emotionally, intellectually,” Proulx says.

In 2023, between 1,700 to 2,100 people were unhoused in London, according to a “snapshot” published by the city earlier this year. The data comes from the City of London’s “By-Name List,” which allows them to track the changing size and composition of their unhoused population. Over 350 people lived completely unsheltered, meaning they never stayed in emergency housing. In November 2023, there were 103 active encampments. This was the highest number of active encampments during the year, though it does not reflect the total number of tents in 2023.

“The thing about London is that everybody knows everybody,” says Cadotte, a current volunteer who was also part of the 2008 group. “There’s a real opportunity to come together as a community and decide a different path to take in our lives, rather than keep pursuing this path of capitalism.”

Cadotte and Proulx both say that the size of London and its geographic layout helps activism thrive. People live and work in close proximity with each other—plus, they are sharing similar lived experiences as working Canadians. “We’re all together in the sandbox,” says Cadotte.

Proulx also points to the land which London’s activism happens on. “The land itself dictates the activism on the land,” they say. “[There is] Deshkan Ziibi—the river that we live along—the nations that are here, the knowledge that we gained from them about what it means to decolonize and what it means to be in relationship with the food that grows from the land.”

On top of end-of-month meal services, Forest City Food Not Bombs has become a mainstay at advocacy events in the city, standing in solidarity and providing food in the process. As crowds filled the steps outside London City Hall to protest a proposed police budget increase in February or took to the streets of downtown London as part of ongoing Palestinian resistance, Forest City Food Not Bombs set up a plastic folding table with a cardboard sign advertising “free soup.”

Most recently, Food Not Bombs volunteers stood at the front gates of London’s Western University alongside striking graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). GTAs, represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada Local 610, are seeking a livable wage in the context of the maximum 10 hours per week they are allowed to work. “If you’re going to have collective resistance ongoing, you need to feed people so that they can continue to show up to these protests,” says Proulx.

Coming up on the group’s one year anniversary, Cadotte and Proulx both said they want Forest City Food Not Bombs to be sustainable as it continues to make change in the London community. “I don’t want to see the standards of success, like exponential growth—it’s not a stock market,” Proulx says. “I want it to grow into the ground.”

As Forest City Food Not Bombs moves into its second year, the group hopes to build its volunteer team and increase its activism, using the present to make change in London.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

Picture this: In your neighbourhood, there’s a place you can go for a healthy meal. It’s prepared by a chef, with farm-fresh ingredients. It’s served in a large, bright, communal dining room popping with conversation. And it’s free.

You’re in that room because you had to leave your job to care for your ailing parents, and you struggle to find money at the end of the month for food. At your table, there are students living off loans, a young mom and her chatty daughter, a widower who lives alone. You eat together, and the meal is delicious. You’re a few of the millions of food-insecure Canadians who can’t always afford enough food to eat, who sometimes need to ask for help. But this place isn’t about charity: it’s about dignity.

The community food centre is busy today. In the kitchen, 14 seniors are making a stir fry together in a cooking class focused on diabetes prevention. Outside, staff are prepping a compost workshop for kids in the after-school program. Volunteer gardeners are harvesting lettuce and squash for tomorrow’s lunch, and their own kitchens. After lunch, people are meeting to plan a campaign calling for more financial support for caregivers.

Government and private funding for places like this one, places that build community around good food and make it available to anyone who needs it, is helping to curb the rates of diet-related illness that have been skyrocketing in low-income neighbourhoods for years. People are healthier and more empowered, too.

There are dozens of community food centres across the country now—more and more every year. They’ve become like libraries, but for food literacy: community gathering places where people exchange recipes, seeds, stories, and support. And the people that keep these spaces going—the students, the widowers, the young moms, and construction workers—have been organizing with other Canadians who are fed up with the unreal state of the food system: fried chicken–flavoured nail polish, sugar-bomb sodas in schools, food workers who can’t afford the food they produce, toxic agricultural practices, food swamps with French fries for miles but not a fresh vegetable in sight. Local fights for better access, wages, and regulations have ignited a paradigm shift. And that shift is bringing in progressive policies that prioritize the health of all Canadians over the wellbeing and profit of a few.

The idea that food is a public good doesn’t seem so radical anymore. Planners are putting food commons back at the centre of communities, and those communities are taking their food decisions into their own hands. People are concerned not only with where their food comes from, but who has access to it. It’s about equality, it’s about health, and it’s about sustainability. We’re getting there. When you start with a good meal, anything can happen.